Who really are the Taliban now in power in Afghanistan
The Taliban are a part of Afghanistan. Domenico Quirico's analysis for La Stampa
Now that defeat is near (the word is whispered, like the murmur of those who no longer have hope), it is time to admit it: America, the West remained twenty years in Afghanistan, they waged a war, chosen and thrown away allies and rulers, distributed money ($ 150 billion a year), killed thousands of people, on the basis of an imaginary, bizarre, affected, puny anthropology, all dressed up in mediocre cunning, pretentious.
A lie of distance and simplification, a fairy tale truth that gave a comforting shape to our desires. In short: we do not know who the Taliban really are who chased us away, something inaccessible and obscure remained. I mean what social classes they represent, whether Wahhabi fanaticism or jihadist nationalism prevails among them, where they recruit martyrs and warriors as if it were enough, mythologically, to stamp one's foot on the ground. Because, reduced to throngs of defeated fugitives in 2002, they have become the storm that is approaching the capital with a wolf's pace. All around them now is confusion, doubt, hesitation, wear and tear.
WHO WATCHES
In Afghanistan you have to die a little to be able to really resurrect. Wars are won in the heads of those who are watching, convincing those who hesitate. Those who have no doubts are few, armies are not drawn from it.
For twenty years even in the narrative we have been content with the word: taleban. It was enough. It was too much: the Taliban, yes, the fanatics, the enemies of women, the iconoclasts of Bamyan. What else is there to say? Because no time is wasted in making the sociology of evil. Which, on the other hand, is often providential. One hesitates to explore, one focuses on one's repugnance. We were satisfied with the photographs of bearded men wrapped in miserable clamids, in menacing poses with their Kalashnikovs. Let's confess it: beyond folklore and history we have never really dealt with who the Afghans are; in fact, their troubles were not the reason we went to Afghanistan.
By the military and by the chancelleries, but alas also by the UN and many NGOs, Afghanistan was handled on the basis of programs that had no bearing in reality and were linked, if anything, to the supreme demands of universal security, ours. The rest was provided by the mediocre abracadabra of "democratic" slogans. We have funded there all the historical forms that the West possesses. Instead, fundamentalism is a key component of the Afghan elites. The Taliban are a part of Afghanistan.
LAWS AND THE BELIEVE
At the beginning of everything there is always war, living immersed in violence every day for decades. It is something that changes anthropologically, that forms and deforms. The Taliban, like all rebels, are people who, in spite of the conquerors, the Russians first, then the Westerners, live according to their own laws and beliefs, envelop themselves in their tragedies and legends, and with this they make history. They risked being annihilated so as not to violate the code known as "htoun wali" which requires Pashtuns to protect and not hand over a guest to the enemy: it was Ben Laden, it was 2001. It would have been a choice to meditate on.
An Afghan friend told me that in these days the guerrillas have conquered, among the many cities, the capital of a famous warlord, one of those corrupt, cruel chieftains, mixed with the shady drug trafficking to which the Americans entrusted twenty years wages war on the Taliban to win it cheaply.
And to whom, unfortunately, they are now thinking of delegating the resistance. Well: they shot a video that they then released on their communication channels (the primitive Taliban, the destroyers of cassette tapes who handle video cameras, there is a need to reflect): they filmed the notable's palace, a monument to pomp and waste from four million dollars, the stables where a hundred thoroughbreds ruminated expensive mash. And then, alternating, images of the city, one of the most derelict in the country. The Taliban commanders have no palaces, they live mixed with their militiamen, they share their poor habits.
THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE
At the end of the twentieth century, the Taliban of Mullah Omar were recruited from the students of the madrasas, of the Koranic schools, and among the peasants of the Pashtun tribal belt, enlisted and armed by the Pakistani services, those of the dazzling but wretched Benazir who was looking for allies in Afghanistan who were pashtuns and fundamentalists.
Taleban: to define oneself means to begin to separate. They became a fearsome political military movement in a country torn apart by an ethnic war that pitted Pashtuns against Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara, each camp supported logistically and politically by foreign subjects. In 1996, for the first victorious march on Kabul, they exploited the void created by that chaos and the anger of the majority at being excluded from power. The harshness of the sharia law, the fear of their ruthless methods, served to break the violent anarchy of the tribal leaders, reopen traffic on the roads of the country. People demanded order and security, at any cost. A scenario that we have seen in other places of the Islamic revolution.
THE HANDS OF BEIJING
Thirty years later the leaders and guerrillas have changed. The bosses are on an equal footing with the Chinese leaders, now their biggest financiers more than opium. Beijing has ambitious plans for this part of the Silk Road now that the Americans have fled.
The fighters are recruited in the marginal areas of the country, the poorest and most forgotten by a central power that has never used US dollars to rebuild a state. Twenty years of American occupation, instead of reducing the social distances between the price-manipulating clans of the rich and the poor classes, have multiplied them.
The new Taliban are no longer the majority of angry students who fail to become ulema, but the jobless, young people pursuing an adventure, or revenge, savaged by the countless collateral damage of our indifferent wars for democracy. Enlisted by exploiting clan and family solidarity, social ties. On which their military and political organization is modeled.
In each village a cell made up of a few cadres, a few dozen part-time fighters, and well-motivated supporters. Religious and elders ensure that decisions are accepted by the population. The Supreme Shura dictates the overall strategy. The world to which Westerners, despite a sugary propaganda full of soldiers who distribute sweets, have always remained strangers, enemies. And then there is integral Afghan nationalism, which often boils down to the power of the dead over the living.
What has not changed, unfortunately, is their theologically totalitarian idea of the world. Without which they would not exist. But when we accepted defeat we were aware of it.
( article taken from La Stampa )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/nuovi-talebani-chi-sono/ on Sun, 22 Aug 2021 07:14:31 +0000.